Abstract: The authenticity identification of tea cultivars is an important part of the research on tea germplasm resources, and the precondition of intellectual property protection of tea cultivars, 45 SSR markers were selected to synthesize fluorescent labeled SSR primer pairs based on the principle of uniform distribution in the genome of the tea plant. Using these markers, 54 clonal tea cultivars in FUJIAN province were amplified by PCR and 9 SSR markers were selected as the core primer pairs after genotyping. The polymorphism information content (PIC) of the core primer pairs was more than 0.5, and the number of all alleles was varied from 3 to 5, the number of genotypes was varied from 5 to 10. These core primer pairs were suitable for identifying the authenticity of tea cultivars for 54 Fujian clonal tea cultivars due to high polymorphism and convenient to genotype. The cultivar identification diagram (CID) was then established using 6 of these core primer pairs. The CID provided primer pairs and its corresponding genotype, by which any cultivar in the CID could be identified. The capacity of the CID can be expanded so as to facilitate the authenticity identification of more clonal tea cultivars. The method was considered to be easy, fast, accurate, stable and practical for the authenticity identification of tea cultivars. The CID is important for the protection of intellectual property of tea cultivars, and will be helpful for the healthy and sustainable development of tea breeding.

Key words: tea plant [Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze], SSR, cultivar identification diagram(CID), cultivar identification